Haunted

 

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Chapter 1

She shuddered awake with a haggard gasp that left her clutching at her chest, dragging in lungsful of air her body seemed to think had been taken from her. For the briefest moment she wasn’t sure where she was, as though she might have been somebody else entirely: their memories clouding her brain.

Terror. Fight, or flight?

Legs pounding, heart pumping, breath ragged. Panicked gasps with every step, pained, pale.

Flight.

She was in a bedroom not her own: where she expected a sturdy nightstand there was a cheap desk, lopsided and peeling. Where a wide, curtained window should have been there was only wall, plastered with posters she didn’t recognize. Her comforter, her pillows, missing, changed to these impostors.

They’re chasing her, two or three of them – she doesn’t quite know for sure, or at least she never saw for sure, but she still knows, down in her thrumming, hurting heart that they’re coming. That they won’t stop, either, not until she’s dead, or they are, and in that case there will just be more to replace them tomorrow night, always more, like drops of water from a deep, black pool, drowning her.

They want something, that much is certain. Something of hers, but what could it be? A thing in her possession? A part of her? Her face? Her name?

Her soul, perhaps, tiny and whimpering.

Her head swam, like coming up for air from a too-deep dive, body aching and screaming and thrashing, knowing it wasn’t going to make it, waiting for water to come sloshing down the throat.

She sprints between gravestones, fast as her legs will carry, beneath a choking, cloying sky that smolders and smiles wickedly down at the wild hunt unfolding below. Steadily upward, toward the peak on the horizon where soft moonlight spills down out of the hungry clouds to bespatter the lone marker there, standing over a fresh, yawning hole that she can’t see but knows anyway is there. She knows, too, what name is thereupon inscribed.

She turns and dodges and puts on speed, hoping, praying, though to whom or what she doesn’t know. Their breath on her neck is like spiders, swarming and seizing. The old, unforgiving paving stones sound hollow underfoot, flat facades of nothingness stretching far and away. Ravenous cackling assaults her ears, billowing up from behind, or from the back of her mind, infecting her – perhaps, after all, they’re not even real, her phantom pursuers, and it’s all in her head. Some cruel madness.

She dares not turn to check.

But at last her persistence wins out: she reaches the old, timeworn hill, with its sad, drooping tree, gnarled branches like withered hands grasping feebly at nothing.

And then it drives into her back – what, she can’t tell, though it might as well be a lance of fire for as much as it hurts. Pain like her soul is being flensed from her body, carved carelessly to be stripped and used somehow. She staggers and stumbles, tries, vainly, to keep going, but the pain is too great, the agony; every jittering step is fire in her veins, and she falls, landing facedown in the dirt next to her own open grave.

Where she was headed all along.

They surround her. Roll her onto her back. She can’t move or protest, can’t stop them. She sees them leering greedily at her, their eyes aflame, their hands bloody. Hot tears streak her face, and a choking lump works into her throat. This is it.

Then come the knives.

She broke the surface, and it really was like emerging from the water: everything was rendered clear, safe, seemingly well. This was her room. The posters on the wall, she’d cut out, taped up. Maps to fantasy realms, the largest of them, dungeon crawls she’d performed either digitally or at a dice-strewn table. Sketches and comic pages filled in the rest of the space.

And it was her lopsided desk, the one she loved even if it was a hand-me-down of four siblings before her, with her accoutrements dumped across its surface. And her window, tiny and half-blocked by a bookshelf, bars on the outside ensuring everything was right where it should be, right where she left it.

So then why couldn’t she shake the feeling that she was supposed to be somebody else? What were these fragments of memory that tugged at the threads of her mind, threatening to unravel the whole of it? And why did a deep and cloying sadness well up inside her, as though she’d lost it all?

She drooped back to the sweat-soaked pillow, her breathing finally slowed. The clock – hers, dotted with stickers, and scratches from when she’d once or twice thrown it at the wall – read half past three. It had to have been a dream, she assured herself, but even still, she couldn’t commit to sleep. Not this night. She spent the rest of it tracing pathways out of the eldritch mines of Evermere, barely able to make out the poster’s tunnels in the dim glow from the bathroom she was too unsettled to get up and intensify.

***

“Andie!” Emilio hollered, leaping bodily onto her bed. She sat up like a startled corpse and threw up blocking hands even before opening her eyes, fending off her little brother’s “time-to-wake-up” smacks. But she was still quick to get her eyes open, for if Emilio was awake – and dressed, Andie realized as she finally did start to take in the world – then it certainly was time to get up. Past time.

She’d fallen asleep after what felt like hours of lying awake in the semi-dark, counting sheep and the goblins who wanted to eat them. As she rose, stiff and aching, she realized the sleep hadn’t done her any favors. She tucked Emilio, who continued to thrash while loudly declaring the time, under her arm and lurched into the bathroom. She pointedly avoided looking in the mirror – Andie didn’t put much stock in her appearance most days, and she certainly didn’t have time to do it today. She grabbed the tube of toothpaste and loaded her brush one-handed.

“You’d beda get ouda hea,” she grumbled around her toothbrush to Emilio. To make her point, she started to peel off her pajamas.

The little boy leapt from her clutches, screamed, “Eww, gross!” and sprinted out of sight.

Andie threw on a crumpled pair of bright orange yoga pants while cleaning her teeth, a wrinkled but perfectly serviceable hoodie in dull gray while rolling on deodorant, and finally her oversized, olive drab army surplus jacket while taming her hair with little more than splayed fingers and muttered threats. The loose, trailing laces of her boots notwithstanding, she was ready to go inside of five minutes.

The only thing left to do, and the only task through which she did not rush, was feeding her pet rat, Winston. He was an adorable little black rat, and she was sure to give him the proper attention he deserved. Once he’d been adequately fed, properly watered, and expertly cuddled, Andie finally made her way to the front of the house.

The cramped kitchen was a bustle of activity, like always. Emilio had already told anybody who would listen how terribly late Andie was making them, so the moment she crossed the threshold she was met with a cavalcade of cajoling and booing. “Yeah, yeah, like none of you ever overslept before,” she sighed at her remaining brothers.

“Only ever once,” Daniel lied, grinning over the top of what was probably the fourth or fifth piece of jellied toast he’d been stuffing into his face.

“Only once this week,” Mateo grunted without looking up from his phone.

“Easy for you to say,” Daniel shot back. “Your fancy college classes don’t start until ten. You get to actually sleep every day.”

“Then if you want to enjoy it like him you’d better turn those C’s into B’s, eh, hermano?” Javier goaded. Ever the dutiful breadwinner, Javier was slipping into his work coveralls, his breakfast already eaten, ready to head out for the day.

“It was only one C!” Daniel stammered, not having expected the tables to turn on him so quickly.

“Only one C this quarter,” Javier chastised. “That’s no way to start your Senior year.”

Before Daniel could rebut, Andie ducked between her brothers and snatched the breakfast sandwich Nico had left her. It was only lukewarm, but Nico was a beast in the kitchen, whether at work or home, and it was delicious. Through a mouthful of food she thanked him. He waved an arm without looking away from the dishes.

“Go on, the three of you,” Javier commanded to his youngest siblings. “If I gotta see one more tardy slip I’ll call Tia Paulina, let her deal with you.”

This was a dire threat indeed, for nobody wanted to invite the ire of their dreaded aunt. The woman lived to lecture, bemoaning any modern thing she cast her eye on as the source of whatever waywardness or delinquency she sensed in her sister’s children, from phones to games to the very internet itself. She was especially critical of Andie, whom she thought wasn’t living up to the womanly standards befitting her gender. Andie couldn’t cook to save her life and wasn’t a particularly thorough housekeeper, so, Tia Paulina argued, she wasn’t worth much to anybody.

“You try growing up in a house with five brothers, see what happens!” she’d once argued under the oppressive force of one of Tia Paulina’s tirades.

“Your mother and I, God rest her soul, were the only two girls in the whole neighborhood, so don’t pretend like you got it harder than anybody else, little missy. Don’t know why you have to play pretend princess of the dragons all the time; you livin’ like a princess already, with brothers who take care of you and love you.”

“I rescue princesses, Tia,” Andie had corrected, which was true: she preferred not to sit around waiting for somebody to come to her aid, whether at the tabletop or anywhere else. But true as it was, clarifying a detail about a roleplay was not the sort of answer her aunt had been looking for.

“Well maybe one of them can teach you how to cook, eh?” she’d snapped back. Tia Paulina hadn’t attempted to show Andie how to cook anything since.

But despite Javier’s threat, he must have known Andie was tired and had allowed her to sleep in as much as he dared. So she kissed him on the cheek as she headed for the door, said, “Gracias, Javi,” and counted her blessings.

“Yeah, Javi,” Daniel joked, pretending to kiss his brother too. Javier shoved his sibling headlong out the door. He spared a high-five for Emilio, who trailed obliviously after.

Despite using it as ammunition against her aunt, however, Andie didn’t dislike living with her brothers. It was cramped and they could all be obnoxious, but so could she. She rather enjoyed being raised in a household of boys, because they didn’t look at her sideways when she didn’t primp and preen. Not like the kids at school. So long as she acted like an equal, they treated her like one.

“Hey, can I drive?” she asked as they approached the car, which the three of them were scheduled to make use of today. With one vehicle to share among six children with widely varying lives, finding a chance to put her brand new driving permit to use wasn’t easy.

“Oh, Andie, you know women aren’t allowed to drive,” Daniel said, blank-faced. Then he held up the keys for her, a mad grin spreading on his face.

Andie’s brothers treated her like an equal – jokes and all.

She snatched the keys from Daniel’s hand and piled into the car with her brothers, and so it was that in the haste and clamor of the entirely normal Tuesday morning, Andie was almost able to forget about the entirely abnormal dream from the night before. She was just getting comfortable with the notion that the ice cream she’d wolfed down far later than she should have while watching a cheap horror movie marathon was the culprit responsible for the inexplicable nightmare.

That was, until she adjusted the rearview mirror – and saw a ghost sitting in the backseat.

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Chapter 2

At first she thought it was one of the shadowed hunters from the dream, which upon later reflection she thought would have been better, since she could have written it off as a trick of the mind, a last, fleeting hallucination left over from the vivid nightmare.

But this was different. The silhouette seated in the back of the car seemed to consist of smoke and light, glowing and shifting like an aurora. It hadn’t discernible features, save the clearly visible outline of a person, occupying three full dimensions: a figure that was, without a doubt, not a construct of glare or peripheral blur. Andie could swear it was really there.

And as such she let out a startled gasp before whirling to face the thing.

The fear-response, instinct-controlled part of her brain believed wholeheartedly there was some interloper sitting in the car, ready to murder her and her brothers, even if the rest of her brain knew it couldn’t be: Emilio was unwittingly buckling in right next to it, and he didn’t seem bothered. Of course, of all of Andie’s brothers, Emilio would have been the one to plop down next to a phantasm and not even care – but that was beside the point.

Andie knew it wasn’t really there, even if in a brief moment of panic she thought otherwise. So when she turned around to confirm what she knew must be true using her own eyes rather than a hastily glimpsed reflection, she was expecting to find an empty seat.

But there it still remained, sitting patiently, the oval shape which would be a head inclined as if to ask if there was some problem.

Andie didn’t scream. She didn’t blink or move or do anything else, either, which extended to breathing: she sat frozen, a sudden statue.

 “Hey, what’s the matter, chica?” Daniel asked from the passenger seat.

Andie shook her head and cast her eyes to her brother, expecting that this time the apparition would finally flee – but it did not. Still it sat.

Nothing’s the matter, she thought. I just had a mental breakdown last night that’s apparently driving me crazy.

“Um,” she mumbled, “N-nothing. I just… thought I saw… something.” The semi-transparent figure seemed to look right at her, not exuding any specific menace, but just calmly waiting, watching, with all the patience in the world. Which made a sort of sense, for if it was some kind of ghost, hadn’t it nothing but time?

“Uh, buuut…?” Daniel guffawed, eying his sister doubtfully. “As in, but it was nothing, yeah?”

Then, finally, the figure faded, like a switch was thrown on its existence, like it had been sucked out of the car by some kind of spirit vacuum. Gone, with no trace left behind.

“But… Yeah. It was nothing,” Andie confirmed, her voice far less certain than she’d have liked.

She turned on the car and pulled out into the street, driving as carefully as if a line of police cruisers were following her.

Once she’d seen Emilio safely to Brockton Elementary, Andie wheeled the car carefully onward to her own school: Valeheights High School, home of the Rewinds. Daniel, as he was wont to do, made a show of not being seen with his sister and leapt from the still-moving car as Andie was hunting for a parking space.

“Don’t wanna be late, right?” he laughed as he jogged across the yard toward the wide, red-bricked building.

Andie eyed the clock in the dash. Eight minutes before first hour. You got this, chica, she thought to herself. And, once she found one of the few remaining spaces, way in the back, made her way through the front doors, and finally down into the east hall where her locker was located, it seemed like she actually might have it, too. Andie liked math, but since the school operated on block scheduling, the totally reasonable and not offensively frequent times she’d been tardy had all somehow managed to land on mornings she had calculus with Mister Throckmorton, he had developed the notion that she didn’t care for him or his subject. The grudge he therefore seemed to harbor against her was well-known within the Junior class. She looked forward to disabusing him of that notion this morning by landing another “technically, but barely” in the on-time slot.

Until, with three minutes to spare, she closed her locker door and was met with the faceless, leering visage of the ghostly apparition from earlier.

“Good gravy!” she barked, flinging her collected supplies all across the hall. The handful of stragglers scattered about all stopped to stare. Andie clenched her fists and breathed deep. “This isn’t happening. This is in my head,” she muttered through teeth clamped tight, fully aware that kids down the hall were watching her talk to herself. “I’m just tired. And I am never eating ice cream again.” She stooped to gather her things, staring at a point just beyond the hazy, floating form that hovered near her locker.

She got her books under her arm, stood, and did her best not to make what she assumed was eye contact with the indistinct silhouette. She checked her watch. Two minutes. Mister Throckmorton’s room was only four doors down, on the same floor. Plenty of time to get in, sit down, and stop hallucinating. Probably. How long could mastering a hallucination take, anyway?

Andie took a step, and the specter followed. Indeed, it seemed to teleport, moving almost as if to block her. She stopped, glaring slightly downward, refusing to actually look at it, to see the strips of ethereal cloth – or flesh – that hung from it like detritus attached to an underwater corpse.

She wasn’t going to let herself be afraid, she promised. She raised her arm and batted at the figure like it was a bothersome fly – and to her relief it vanished, disappearing like a wisp of smoke.

It confirmed that she might be crazy, but it was a positive advancement. So she strode into morning math and sat down with a healthy fifty seconds or so left before her insanity would have rendered her tardy.

***

“I’m telling you, Vanessa,” Andie said to her best friend over a mouthful of fries at lunch, “it looked real. Like, really real. As in, it was actually there.”

“Girl, please,” Vanessa chortled. “You’re trippin’ hard. You sure you didn’t hit your head or anything?”

“For real!” Andie whined, munching another fry. “It was real spooky, too. And when I waved it away or whatever? Gone. Just like that,” she recalled, punctuating this last with a snap.

“Okay, girl,” Vanessa sighed, lifting a grease-stained napkin off her slice of pizza. “Then I guess you really do have a crazy ghost stalker hanging around you.”

“Don’t make fun of me!” Andie complained. “It was really scary! You don’t even know. I thought my heart was gonna jump right out of my chest.”

“Well, dang, what do you want me to say? Either there straight up really was a ghost in your car, which is crazy, or you’re crazy – which is crazy.”

Andie slumped in the cheap, molded cafeteria bench and huffed, maneuvering a bottle of water languidly to her mouth.

“Or,” Vanessa added sternly, “you’re just tired ‘cause you stayed up late binging on ice cream again.”

“Oh my god, it’s so good!” Andie replied by way of excuse. “Ice cream and I have a very deep relationship, I’ll have you know.” A tiny part of Andie wished it wasn’t the case, but she enjoyed food too much to invest any real hope in the wish. Fortunately, it was a trait she and Vanessa usually had in common, the latter’s recent but feeble dieting trend notwithstanding.

“Mm-hm,” Vanessa nodded as she began to eat. “Whatever you say, hon.”

And there it was left, nothing more to be said. Andie hadn’t put much emphasis on just how real it had all felt: the dream, the lingering visions and memories, like walking into a room but unable to recall what she’d come in for. She had avoided stressing too much how overwhelmingly real the apparition had felt, nor how detailed.

What would’ve been the point? Vanessa was right, after all; she had to be. It couldn’t have been real, even if Andie believed it was, even if only for a moment. Even if, as she’d discovered upon internet investigation during free period, simple visual hallucinations were rarely so vivid or detailed. The believability of the figure, the gnawing sense of something weighing in her gut, proved not the thing’s veracity but her own shattered mind.

So she let it go, no big deal, and tried to ignore the nagging suspicion in the back of her mind that she might not be able to pick up all the pieces. Perhaps if she just believed hard enough that none of it was real, then that reality would come to be.

But despite her best efforts throughout the rest of the day to remain focused, she couldn’t help feeling that someone or something was watching her, trailing after her like a wayward animal. Was it lost and lonely? Or hungry?

The day passed in a blurry haze, like her brain was overcrowded with too many thoughts – fears, worries, and hidden anxieties. Or new content, perhaps, new memories entire, but from whom? A gathering sense of dread grew in her like a storm, like hilarity. The air felt charged, and Andie felt silly – for letting the dream, or her tiredness, or both toy with her so. Maybe Tia Paulina was right; maybe she did indulge in too many flights of fancy.

After school she dove into her homework with uncharacteristic aplomb. Her older brothers wouldn’t be home for hours yet: they all three worked long hours to help pay for the family’s needs. That left the house quieter than usual – Emilio’s rambunctiousness notwithstanding – until Javier returned after sunset.

Andie sequestered herself in her room. After the death of their father, her brothers had through unspoken agreement bequeathed her with the master bedroom, because of its private bathroom. It wasn’t that they couldn’t or wouldn’t share with her – they had done for many years until that point. But it just seemed easier on all parties to give Andie a little space. Their mother had been gone for so long that, no matter how well she got along with her otherwise male household, she’d been left the only woman in the house.

Andie often wondered if the recent years of isolation had only added to her pragmatic, withdrawn nature. But tonight she was glad for it. Tonight, she didn’t just want the space. She needed it.

Winston kept her company enough. She cleaned his cage and played with him on her bed, doing her best to lose herself in his bruxing and tiny susurrations. The rat was her cherished pet and even companion, watching as she crafted tabletop campaigns, accompanying as she played them out, and always standing by to administer the kind of advice only pets can, dispensed from the velvety depth of their infinitely wise eyes.

She made sure not to touch a crumb of food after dark. No caffeine or sugar; only water. No videogames or television past seven. She read through a few old dungeon master’s guides, focusing on the mundane, mechanical aspects of how to translate the rolls of a handful of dice into combat. Nothing ethereal or otherworldly. Certainly nothing to do with ghosts, spirits, visions, or, for good measure, even aliens.

And shortly after nine she laid down for bed, determined not to dream.

She was not entirely successful.

***

The door swings open and she steps through, although once she crosses the threshold she can’t remember what room she was in, or how or why she got there. It would do no good to turn around and look now: the door is not only closed, but gone. The vague sensation of falling, or perhaps drowning, tugs at some frayed fragment of recollection but as she beholds the plateau ahead it whispers away to nothing.

Stretching before her, etched in a chalky, indistinct hand, is a wide precipice made of motes of shifting light. Cold, scratchy tangles of grass and weed dot the rocky, unfeeling surface: she can feel them more than see them, there along the ridge; she knows they exist because somebody has already stumbled through them, long before.

So it is with everything she sees: more felt than seen, she knows there is a stepped incline leading down because it has been known. It has been rendered into being by the memory shaping it. Without quite seeing she marches forward and picks her way down the slope.

The path leads to a valley where thick columns of black granite and sun-bleached limestone fill the void, towering overhead like leering bullies. Beyond them, a street springs forth, marbled as though the contrasting stones have toppled to form the road. It is mostly a normal street: wider than she might have expected, the far side eaten up by blue fog; shivering and rippling with distant reverberations, each rattling echo rendering finer detail, as though the place is being shaped thereby.

This place seems foreign to her, alien. Sounds carry not as they ought, disappearing and returning at strange places, hollow and muted. A distant and ever-present wind sweeps the land with a touch at first icy that then melts to comforting warmth, passing in heavy waves. Nothing seems entirely solid, the surfaces of things warping and swaying slightly as though everything is underwater.

Despite the dreamlike sheen, she doesn’t feel like this is any dream she’s ever had. And as she advances down the causeway, she feels like she is being watched. A haunting presence seems to follow her, trailing slowly, but when she spins round to confront it, there is nothing waiting.

As she rounds a corner, however, whatever it is that has been following her – or echoing her, perhaps – chooses to show itself. It floats into her path, ghostly silent, hovering there, waiting. She recognizes it immediately, as though through some embedded kinship: this is the figure from the waking world, the pale, smoky phantom manifest. It is rendered in greater detail, but still the edges are blurry and undefined, the features lost and indistinct.

It stretches out a long limb and beckons slowly to her, turning to lead. She looks around, wondering if this might be some trap, if finally the thing’s plan bears fruit. But what else can she do? Where can she go?

She takes a slow step forward, and she feels some measure of relief radiate from the silhouette. She knows, somehow, that she is attuned to its feelings. Sadness and despair roll over her in waves, but there is hope there, too, confidence as she shows it trust.

They walk through stretching alleyways and down tight stairs. Through tunnels that narrow before flaring wide again. Down long, sweeping lanes that stretch for blocks beneath the shadowed facades of smirking buildings. And all the while the world grows clearer, more distinct. Detail ratchets in: trash at the curb, the leavings of life. The idea of traffic spills down the road, not manifest but undoubtedly there.

And something else grows, too, with the clarity, with the detail. A feeling, poisoning everything around them. It taints what there is to see, twisting and hardening, blackening. It is fear. The formless form leading her is afraid.

And she is, too.

Then, from the encroaching darkness looms suddenly the wrought-iron gate of a cemetery, as though it had grown like some vile plant. A cemetery which she knows.

And now she knows why they should both be afraid.

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Chapter 3

Andie awoke groggily, by degrees, her mouth dry and tasting of metal. She rolled over in her tiny bed, gathering the blankets about her like a cocoon. Split her eyelids just enough to see that the first rays of early light were beginning to fall through the half-covered sliver of her window. Groaned.

At least I didn’t oversleep, she thought ruefully even as the headache came on, as she stretched and rolled and tested strange, inexplicable aches in her joints and body.

What had happened to her? The memories of her dream seemed vivid and clear, not like any normal dream, which she might usually struggle to grasp like so many fistfuls of loose sand. She recalled it all: the wide expanse of the dreamscape, oddly vibrant, as though rendered in a cel-shaded graphics engine; the arrival of the apparition, somehow benign, their emotions linked; and the graveyard, dark and ominous, feeling like finality, like a dreaded, resolute ending.

She’d entered the cemetery again, followed the same path through the tombstones and the dusty mausoleums, each one harshly lined and feeling heavier than the last. This time, however, she felt like she was a passenger, a spectator, watching as the semi-opaque silhouette made its way through the maze and toward its apparent end.

The spectral hunters were there, too, more distinct, clearer, hissing and thirsting, their many limbs dragging behind them flailing. They were like human shadows given form and substance, twisted and vile and covetous. She’d watched in mute dismay as they coursed the white specter before finally overtaking it. That, however, was all she could remember.

At length she lifted herself from the bed, finally opening her eyes, half-expecting to see the figure leering down at her. She found herself thankfully alone. She rose and prepared herself for the day as usual, less hurried this morning, and met her routine with as much bravado as she could muster. In fairness to Winston, she made sure to give him more attention than she reserved for herself.

She still felt oddly drained, however, and a nagging sense of something nearly forgotten gnawed at her. She ate breakfast, expertly prepared as usual by Nico, and tried to remember what it was. There was some familiarity to the dream, as though she’d seen some part of it before, or had been there. The more she thought about it, the stronger the feeling grew, that sense of surety, but no answers came with it.

Since the car was not theirs to use today, Andie and Daniel walked Emilio down to the bus stop and saw him safely aboard before racing to their own stop another block over. They climbed on and found separate seats, Daniel plopping down next to some of his friends, Andie securing an empty spot near the back. She stared distractedly out the window as the bus trundled along its route, still trying to puzzle out the meaning of her dreams while hoping no more hallucinations would follow. What had she done to fracture her mind so?

The bus wound around a wide bluff that erupted in the middle of the neighborhood before sidling onto the street that would deliver it into the desolate spread of old downtown. Some of the oldest houses and buildings in the city could be found here, and there was an odd disparity between money and lack thereof: one aged mansion, in need of restoration but still highly valued, might be flanked on either side by tenement housing. Potholed streets bisected a comely lane, some blocks littered with barely-salvaged cars while others displayed carefully manicured rose gardens.

A wrought-iron fence sprung up on one side of the road, backed by the heavily-treed bluff. Grave markers filled the plot inside; Andie watched as a fence came into view, and with it the sudden realization of what she’d been trying to remember all morning: she did know this place.

This was Mount Vale Cemetery, one of the oldest in the city. Her parents were buried here, along with a few distant relatives, in the shadow of the towering bluff. She’d been inside a number of times, for funerals and visitations, although two particular occasions she would rather not recall. Though she did not think the details of the layout were exactly the same, this was undoubtedly the place from her dream. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized it sooner.

Had, in her imaginative subconscious, she concocted the dream using stray bits of recollection from Mount Vale? And what of the strange silhouette? An invention of her sleeping mind meant to lead her to the answer, to this conclusion? Why?

She rubbed her head, which still ached, along with her muscles. She felt stringy and drained, like she’d been the one running through the cemetery. Maybe I’m sleepwalking somehow, she thought to herself.

Yeah, and maybe I’m sleep-crazy.

School passed by as usual, although Andie had a hard time focusing. Her head hurt; she wondered if maybe she was dehydrated and got herself a bottle of water, but that didn’t seem to help. She didn’t have any classes with Vanessa until the afternoon, so she couldn’t talk about the dream or how she was feeling – and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to, either. She didn’t know what any of it meant, and if she made a big deal she might start to sound as crazy as she felt.

In free period, spent in the library, a few of her friends from Tabletop Club invited her to a short session. Leo, a boy her age, approached with, “Hey, fancy a bit of orc-slaying?”

She’d been resting her pounding head on the cool wood of the table, staring out the window at the overcast sky and wondering, but not believing, if maybe a storm was coming, the shifting pressure giving her a headache. She looked up slowly and offered a weak smile. “Thanks, Leo… But maybe not today. I got a killer headache.”

Leo shrugged. “S’okay.” Turning to the others who’d already gathered at a nearby table he announced, “Hey, no red mage today, guys.” They murmured their disapproval – without the manipulative magic of Andie’s character, the party would have a tougher time buffing their stats and debuffing negative status effects.

Leo, already adopting the veneer of a harsh dungeon-master, growled, “No whining! Or are ye not proper adventurers? Will ye not tackle the orcish mobs by strength of steel alone?”

Even though she did not join, Andie still could not resist the lure of the roleplay, and she migrated to the adjacent table to watch. The distraction proved relaxing enough, and as her friends’ party routed a nest of orcling thugs she found herself starting to doze.

When she opened her eyes, everybody was gone.

The library was eerily quiet, and soft, blue light filtered in through the window. The lights seemed dimmer, like it was after regular school hours. Andie sat up. Had she slept the day away? Why hadn’t anybody woken her up? Miss Staunton, the librarian, was a no-nonsense slave to the rules; surely she would have…

There was a sound. Around the corner, from somewhere within the stacks.

Andie got up, shifting her chair out of the way. The motion felt slow and syrupy, and the sound the wood made scraping across the carpet rang flat, as though soundwaves had just as hard a time of transmitting through the air.

She stepped slowly around the table and faced the bookshelves, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound: a stretching, scraping, something pulled taught and swaying.

And pinpoint it she did.

Hanging in the aisle between the Resource and Medieval History sections was a man, roughly in his thirties, his face and skin gone gray. The rope cinched around his neck was an orange electrical cord, its knobby end dangling limp on the man’s chest. He swayed back and forth, bits of him – indistinct and blurred – dripping into the carpet like blood, pooling.

The hanged man’s eyes drifted lazily open, and found Andie standing there, staring. His mouth opened in a sepulchral sigh, and across rotting teeth wheezed a word. “You,” said the corpse. A hand raised, pointing, reaching, demanding.

Andie gasped and sat up in her chair like she’d been about to fall over. Her friends regarded her only momentarily, a couple of them grinning, before returning to their game.

“Okay,” said Leo, “you hit him for three-d-six damage. He recoils but doesn’t go down, the arrow sticking out of his chest like a flag. He snaps off the haft and flings it away, black blood spattering…”

Andie got up.

She leaned around the corner slowly, peeking down the length of shelves. Nothing was there.

She sighed.

She spotted an empty computer and wandered over. Logging in, she opened a browser and decided to kill some time. She and her brothers shared a single desktop computer at home, so she didn’t get much time to use the internet. She glanced halfheartedly at updates on social networks, checked her email, and perused a roleplay forum.

Then, without really thinking about it, she typed Mount Vale Cemetery into the search engine. She navigated to the image results, confirming that what she’d remembered was correct: Mount Vale was the place from her dreams. The same old crypts, the hill at the back. Even the same ancient oak stood there, the one under which…

She shook her head. Backed out of the grainy old images.

Saw something she’d missed.

It was the first result: a news article involving Mount Vale, from yesterday. She hovered her mouse cursor over the headline. “Teen Found Murdered in Mount Vale Cemetery.”

Hesitated.

Then clicked.

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